I'm usually cynical about writings that attempt to use the lives of successful people to prescribe how others can replicate them. For that also, I mostly mistrust motivational speakers and their clever marketing tactics that whip up emotions than substance. All of them, glibs! More than the benefits of coping mechanism (for the weary, for the hopeless, for the defeated, for the confused, for the superstitious), I treat motivational speaking with suspicion. There's a salesman selling fantasy with mesmerizing language. All of them, placebo!

Unfortunately, the domain I prefer for coping mechanism - Science, has not found a scientific type of motivational speaking or speaker, beyond the dots that Psychology pieces together. It's not like I expect to take life direction from Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, or Gosh forbid - even Richard Dawkins. But Science needs to provide something to motivate those that only believe in Science over anything else, only believe in Reason over unreason.

But I like this piece about Elon Musk for treating the path to success with logic, and especially referring to the phenomenon of Narrative Fallacy, of looking through a timeline and putting dots together along decisions, circumstances, etc.

It says Elon Musk finished reading the Brittanica. I'm sad now because I started reading the Brittanica as a teenager. I used to sneak into a family friend’s library to read his complete Brittanica. Who knows what I would have become today if I had finished. Maybe I'd be colonizing the Sun & Uranus by now. ;) PS: I'm going to resume the Brittanica.